Robert Myers-Imagn Images
UNC football coach Mack Brown with fishing rods and golf clubs
College football coaches have developed plenty of strange ways to evaluate job candidates, but Mack Brown apparently had one that would terrify every assistant who forgot to clean out his car. Before hiring coaches, Brown says he would sometimes look in their trunks for two pieces of evidence that could immediately make him question the entire operation: golf clubs and a fishing rod.
Brown revealed the wonderfully old-school hiring test while discussing golfers in the coaching profession. According to FootballScoop, Brown said he never viewed being a good golfer as a particularly encouraging quality for an assistant and explained that “if he had a fishing rod and a golf club, I wasn’t gonna hire him.”
Mack Brown Apparently Conducted The Trunk Portion Of The Interview
Forget references and forget the résumé for a moment. We need to see the Toyota Camry.
Brown’s logic was pretty straightforward, even if the execution feels completely insane by modern hiring standards. College football coaching, especially during the era when he built his career, was an all-consuming profession, and recreational equipment sitting in the trunk apparently raised a question about where football ranked on a candidate’s list of priorities.
It is an absolutely brutal standard for anyone who believes normal adults should occasionally possess hobbies.
Imagine spending weeks preparing for an interview at Texas, carefully assembling your recruiting philosophy, offensive concepts, and answers about player development. You nail the meeting, Brown likes you, everyone shakes hands, and then he walks into the parking lot and discovers a TaylorMade driver sitting beside a tackle box.
Thank you for your interest.
Brown certainly had enough opportunities to apply the test. His official bio credits him with 36 seasons as a head coach, 288 career victories, and stops leading Appalachian State, Tulane, North Carolina, and Texas, including the Longhorns’ 2005 national championship.
That is nearly four decades of assembling staffs, replacing assistants and interviewing coaches.
There is a non-zero chance somebody’s career path changed because he went to Bass Pro Shops on the wrong afternoon.
Hobbies Were Apparently A Scouting Report
The funniest part is how much information Brown believed he could extract from two random objects sitting in someone’s car.
A fishing rod does not necessarily mean a coach is disappearing to a lake every Wednesday afternoon. Golf clubs could have been sitting untouched for six months, or the candidate might simply have forgotten they were there after a charity scramble.
Brown apparently was not interested in conducting that investigation.
The philosophy fits an older version of coaching culture where obsessive commitment was treated almost like another recruiting skill. Assistants were expected to spend absurd hours breaking down film, recruiting high schools, making calls and generally structuring their lives around football, so evidence that someone might be really good at relaxing could apparently become a negative.
Modern programs have personnel departments, analysts, recruiting databases, background checks and enough performance data to evaluate a potential hire from approximately 600 different angles.
Brown had another metric available.
What is rattling around in your trunk?
So if you ever interviewed with Mack Brown and did not get the job, maybe it was not your scheme, personality or recruiting plan.
Maybe you should have left the fishing rod at home.